Russia moving to silence voice of native people

Reason trumped up, they say

A forest fire rages outside Atka, Russia, in July. Advocacy groups say a shifting climate has already started to affect hunting, fishing and herding in indigenous areas. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael Robinson Chavez
A forest fire rages outside Atka, Russia, in July. Advocacy groups say a shifting climate has already started to affect hunting, fishing and herding in indigenous areas. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Michael Robinson Chavez

MOSCOW -- The indigenous people scattered across Russia's Arctic and the Far East, hard-pressed by climate change and expansion-minded timber and mining interests, are on the verge of losing the one voice that speaks most clearly for them.

A court in Moscow earlier this month ordered the closure of a nearly 20-year-old advocacy group on the grounds that its paperwork was incomplete.

But the group's allies say that is nonsense: that the alleged violation is nothing but a pretext, the final act in a long campaign by the authorities to silence the organization.

"It's not a legal issue. It's a political one," said Rodion Sulyandziga, the director of the Center for Support of Indigenous People of the North/Russian Indigenous Training Center. "There's a big conflict of interest between corporations and indigenous people."

For years, the center has been holding seminars and training sessions on legal issues, economic development, pollution and climate change.

Sulyandziga said the shifting climate has already started to affect hunting, fishing and herding in the indigenous areas, with more serious forest fires and floods. The group also monitored the actions of regional governments and major Russian companies, and participated in international forums.

All this has inevitably drawn the hostile attention of the authorities.

"The center is the most important indigenous rights group in Russia," said Grigory Vaypan of the Institute of Law and Public Policy, who represents the group in court.

This month's court ruling is a death sentence for his organization unless it can be overturned on appeal.

"We are doing our job, according to the Russian constitution, which guarantees indigenous people their rights," he said.

But rights everywhere in the country, he said, are under harsh new attack.

Pavel Chikov, a lawyer who heads the Agora human rights group, said the wider crackdowns date to last summer, in the wake of street protests in Moscow over local elections.

Activities that were once tolerated have been abruptly subject to repression, he said. "Suddenly everything changes, and what was OK is now not OK. The unpredictability is very high, and the rules are changing all the time," he said.

Previously, Vaypan said, the government would at least try to show that an organization it wanted to repress had caused some harm.

But now, he said, "any NGO in Russia can be dissolved for any reason -- for a missing comma."

Sulyandziga belongs to the Udege ethnic group, which lives in forest villages in Russia's Far East, along the Bikin River. There are about 1,800 Udege altogether. They hold that the Amur tiger is their common ancestor.

Russia's more than 40 indigenous groups had no organization or anyone to speak for them until after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. They make up just 0.2% of the country's population and rank near the bottom in income and life expectancy.

Between the censuses of 2000 and 2010, two indigenous peoples died off: the Alyutors and the Kerek.

Sulyandziga said Canadian Inuit groups had been especially helpful in teaching indigenous Russians how to organize and advocate for themselves. Since then, his group has become a partner in various international Arctic organizations and has had access to U.N. forums, where its concerns about rights and the environment have been heard.

"The Arctic," he said, "is a very sensitive topic for Russia" -- important geopolitically and offering tempting economic boons.

Information for this article was contributed by Natalia Abbakumova of The Washington Post.

A Section on 11/18/2019

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